First post here, thanks for the free membership! Anyways, Dick Vitale is already an idiot in college bball, what merit does he have in pro? The worst part is he threw in a "baby" in an online column! Everyone was wrong. I think only the city of Houston believed we were making the right pick. I especially love the Yao over Williams being referred to in the same breath as Bowie over Jordan. We all saw how that worked out.
That was one of the major reasons for my original post. When they said that Yao was not living up to expectations earlier, I was like: "WTF? You expected him to be L. Martin and out of the league in 4-5 years, did he live up to that kind of expectation?"
It is hard to believe so many idiots went so far out of their way to trash Yao. The one thing I do remember that scared me at the time was from an unnamed GM who basically said that a lot of GMs he'd talked to felt sorry for CD/Rudy in that draft. The guy's point was you never want to miss on an overall #1 and GMs hated the prospect of drafting a player that was "risky" simply because you can't really afford to pass them up. In other words supposedly there were GMs that really didn't want to make that decision one way or the other. I'd love to see an honest poll of how many GMs would have traded the pick at that time. Of course Houston being Houston made it a no-brainer. We can only go so long without a franchise center and I personally consider it a birthright.
Well, journalists like to be controversial and extreme to get attention. I feel sorry for the industry, heh
i also remember when the rockets won the lottery and got the #1 pick, george karl, who was an analyst with espn at the time, said that if he had the #1 pick he would trade it, because there's no way he would take a player like yao....i'm sure he feels like an idiot now...i've never liked karl, he's a proven loser, his teams have never been able to close the deal and ive especially hated him since the time he ran out onto the court and attacked Otis Thorpe during one of the playoff series we had with the sonics in the 1990s
